Biography

Christopher Morris lives in Dallas, Texas, and is Professor of History at the University of Texas, Arlington. He is the author of two books, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860, and The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina. In addition, he has authored more than a dozen articles, essays, and book chapters, and co-edited of three essay collections. He is best known for his work on the relationship between people and the natural environment in the American South, although his work has taken him around the world. For example, he has written on comparative river delta environments in North America, Senegal, India, and China. He is also part of an interdisciplinary team that is investigating the climate history of the Great Lakes as embedded in eighteenth and nineteenth century maps. Morris holds a doctorate from the University of Florida, where he studied with the eminent southern historian, Bertram Wyatt-Brown. He has received several awards, including a Pulitzer nomination and a senior fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center. At present Morris is working on a book tentatively titled Nitrogen Networks. The study begins with Ned Cobb, an early twentieth century Alabama tenant farmer in need of nitrogen fertilizer, and situates him within a global trade in nitrogen and nitrogen compounds. Nitrogen networks connected Ned Cobb and his Tallapoosa County community to South America and Europe, and to the larger world of science, industrial capitalism, war, and environmental destruction, and back again.

Full CV is available for download at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/udlox1etrk04gbh/VITA%2C%2012-17-2015.doc?dl=0

Simply copy and paste this URL into your browser, or click on the live link at the bottom of this page.

Links

Research and Expertise

History and Environment

U.S. South, Slavery, Environmental History of the U.S.; Mississippi River Valley; rivers, lakes, coastlines, water, fish

Current Research

1.Nitrogen Networks. The study begins with Ned Cobb, an early twentieth century Alabama tenant farmer in need of nitrogen fertilizer, and situates him within a global trade in nitrogen and nitrogen compounds. Whereas studies of capitalism that often focus on commodities miss environmental connections and implications, my study will focus on a single element, nitrogen, and the ways people have extracted it from some natural environments (principally by harnessing plants, animals, and their ecologies), repackaged it as compounds placed into commodities, and shipped it to distant environments where they released it back into the environment. Each step in the process--extraction, repackaging, release--brought people into contested relations with each other and with non-human nature. Nitrogen Networks connects Ned Cobb and his Tallapoosa County community to South America and Europe, and to the larger arenas of science, industrial capitalism, world war, the Green Revolution, environmental degradation, global nitrogen cycles, and back again.

2. Mapping the Great Lakes: Computational Visual Analysis, Historical Cartography, and Climate History, 1650-1850.” I am working as part of an interdisciplinary collaboration involving computer scientists and humanists that is digitizing over 400 maps and machine reading (at the supercomputing center at the University of Illinois) their variations in cartographic depictions of coastlines, islands, and water passages for evidence of short-term meteorological and long-term climatological change. My contribution includes research into the climatological and hydrological history of the Great Lakes based on published physical and biological data and archival records in Canadian and U. S. archives. The University of Pennsylvania Press has expressed interest in publication as part of a digital humanities series.

Collaborators: Robert Markley, University of Illinois. Michael Simeone, Arizona State University

"Disturbing the Mississippi: The Language of Science, Engineering, and River Restoration," Open Rivers: Rethinking the Mississippi (Spring 2016).

{Journal Article }

Journal Article2018

"The Canoe and the Superpixel: Image Analysis of the Changing Shorelines on Historical Maps of the Great Lakes," Journal18: A Journal of Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, co-authored with Robert Markley, U. of Illinois, Kenton McHenry, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Michael Simeone, Arizona State U.

{Journal Article }

Book Chapter2017

"The American South in the French Empire: Les Étés Longs et Chauds," in European Empires in the American South, edited by Joseph P. Ward. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, September 2017.

{Book Chapter }

Book Review2017

Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South. By Paul S. Sutter. Agricultural History, (Winter 2017): 120-122.

{Book Review }

Encyclopedia Entry2017

"Environmental History of the Mississippi River," Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (September 2017), 30pp. http://environmentalscience.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.001.0001/acrefore-9780199389414-e-114

Attached Links

“The Intellectual Lives of Natchez and Concord, and the Legacies of Slavery,” Southern Quarterly (March 2017).

[Peer Selected]

{Journal Article }

Journal Article2016

"Disturbing the Mississippi: The Language of Science, Engineering, and River Restoration," Open Rivers:Rethinking the Mississippi Second Issue (April, 2016), available online at http://editions.lib.umn.edu/openrivers/

“Reckoning with ‘The Crookedest River in the World’: The Maps of Harold Norman Fisk," Southern Quarterly Special Issue on the Mississippi River as Twentieth-Century Southern Icon, 52 (Spring 2015): 30-44.

[Peer Selected].

{Journal Article }

Book Review2014

The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes. By Conevery Bolton Valencius, The American Historical Review 119 (December, 2014): 1689-1690.

{Book Review }

Book2012

Christopher Morris, The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples, from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

{Book }

Book Chapter2011

"Strange Career of Gideon Gibson: An Early American Tragedy." In Southern Character: Essays in Honor of Bertram Wyatt-Brown, edited by Lisa Tendrich Frank and Daniel Kilbride, 25-40. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011.

Morris, Christopher. "How to Prepare Buffalo, and Other Things French Taught Indians about Nature." In French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, edited by Bradley G. Bond, 22-42. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.

{Book Chapter }

Book Review2004

"A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective, by Peter Kolchin." .The American Historical Review, June, 2004: 864-865.

Morris, Christopher. "Impenetrable but Easy: The French Transformation of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Founding of New Orleans." Centuries of Change: Human Transformation of the Lower Mississippi, edited by Craig E. Colten, 22-42. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

{Book Chapter }

Book Review1999

"Masters, Slaves and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Country, 1740-1790, by Robert Olwell." .Journal of American History 86, June, 1999: 217-218.

{Book Review }

1999

"Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama, 1800-1840, by Daniel S. Dupre." .for H-SHEAR, H-NET List of the Society for the History of the Early American Republic, H-SHEAR@H-NET.MSU.EDU, March, 1999: 6 pp.

Morris, Christopher. Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life,Vicksburg and Warren County, Mississippi 1770-1860 (A History Book Club main selection; nominated for the Pulitzer Prize). New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

View Event Details

March 2016An American River? The Mississippi in Global Historical Perspective

From the French colonial era to the present, the Mississippi River has existed within a global context, in some cases through imagined comparisons with other rivers around the world, in other cases through common approaches to engineering and flood control, for example, on the Po River in Italy and on the Mississippi, and in other contexts through competition for global markets among producers of commodities, such as fish and rice, produced in similar river delta environments from China to Africa to India to Louisiana.

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February 2016“Nitrogen Networks: From Ned Cobb’s Alabama to the Early Twentieth-Century World and Back”

On the nineteenth and early twentieth century global exchange in nitrogen, packaged as various nitrogen compounds used in fertilizers. Nitrogen compounds produced through natural and artificial processes moved nitrogen from the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to fish off the coasts of the Americas to Peruvian birds and guano islands and Virginia fertilizer factories to Alabama cotton fields and finally, in the form of runoff, back to the oceans.

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February 2016"Legacies of Enlightenment and Darkness: The Burden of History in Natchez, Mississippi"

Presentation on the exceptionally vibrant intellectual community in antebellum Natchez, a community comparable to that of the more famous contemporary community of intellects in Concord, Massachusetts. However, that community in Natchez was based on the labor and wealth produced by thousands of enslaved people. Just as the intellectual history of New England has distracted attention from the region's ties to slavery, the legacy of slavery and efforts to repress its memory have distracted attention from intellectual accomplishments in the South. In other words, Concord and Natchez, North and South, were not so very different, in that the very significant intellectual and artistic accomplishments of both regions were closely connected to the exploitation of enslaved men and women.

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April 2015“Speaking of the Mississippi: America’s Great River In Words and Deeds"

This presentation used original research to xamine crucial connections between the language of science, engineering, flood control, river restoration, and the Mississippi River over the twentieth century.

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Sawyer Seminar Symposium on The Once and Future River: Imagining the Mississippi in an Era of Climate Changeat Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota, Apr 2015

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November 2014“Mapping the Great Lakes: Historical Cartography and Climate History, 1650-1850"

Seventeenth to nineteenth century French, British, and U.S. maps of the Great Lakes may hold evidence of the region’s environmental and climate history, provided that evidence is unlocked and revealed. Exactly what sort of climate evidence and where it may be found in the maps is the subject of this presentation.

This presentation is based on approximately 400 historical maps of the Great Lakes drawn and printed between 1650 and 1850 that have been compiled and digitized as part of a Digging into Image Data Grant (DID) project jointly funded by the NSF/NEH/JISC. The DID research team, of which I am a collaborator, discovered within the maps potential evidence of short-term meteorological and long-term climatological data in the form of variation in cartographic depictions of coastlines, islands, and water passages. Subsequent research into the climatological and hydrological history of the Great Lakes, using textual evidence gathered from archives in Canada and the U. S. archives and data for the region’s physical and biological history, has strengthened our hypothesis, that the maps hold evidence of the region’s environmental history. The research strategy is to layer archival sources and biophysical data over our computer-assisted observations of our digitized collection of 400+ maps.

Projects

2017

Feb 2017 to
Present Nitrogen Networks.

1. Nitrogen Networks. The study begins with Ned Cobb, an early twentieth century Alabama tenant farmer in need of nitrogen fertilizer, and situates him within a global trade in nitrogen and nitrogen compounds. Whereas studies of capitalism that often focus on commodities miss environmental connections and implications, my study will focus on a single element, nitrogen, and the ways it has been extracted from some natural environments, repackaged as compounds that were placed into commodities, and shipped to distant environments where it was released back into the environment. Each step in the process--extraction, repackaging, release--brought people into contested relations with each other and with non-human nature. Nitrogen Networks connects Ned Cobb and his Tallapoosa County community to South America and Europe, and to the larger arenas of science, industrial capitalism, world war, environmental degradation, and global nitrogen cycles, and back again.

Role: Principal InvestigatorPI: Dr. Christopher Morris

Feb 2017 to
Present 2. Mapping the Great Lakes: Computational Visual Analysis, Historical Cartography, and Climate History, 1650-1850.” I am working as part of an interdisciplinary collaboration involving computer scientists and humanists that is digitizing over 400 maps and

2. Mapping the Great Lakes: Computational Visual Analysis, Historical Cartography, and Climate History, 1650-1850.” I am working as part of an interdisciplinary collaboration involving computer scientists and humanists that is digitizing over 400 maps and machine reading (at the supercomputing center at the University of Illinois) their variations in cartographic depictions of coastlines, islands, and water passages for evidence of short-term meteorological and long-term climatological change. My contribution includes research into the climatological and hydrological history of the Great Lakes based on published physical and biological data and archival records in Canadian and U. S. archives. The University of Pennsylvania Press has expressed interest in publication as part of a digital humanities series.

Collaborators: Robert Markley, University of Illinois. Michael Simeone, Arizona State University

Collaborators: Robert Markley, University of Illinois. Michael Simeone, Arizona State University

Role: CoinvestigatorPI: Robert Markley, University of Illinois

Other Research Activities

2013

Awards and Fellowships

July 2013Departmental Fellowship

University of Florida

2004

Awards and Fellowships

Jan 2004Stanford Humanities Center Senior Fellow

2004-2005, Stanford University

1996

Awards and Fellowships

Mar 1996Outstanding Research Achievement Award

The University of Texas at Arlington, April 1996

1995

Awards and Fellowships

Jan 1995Pulitzer Prize nominee

1991

Awards and Fellowships

Jan 1991Phi Beta Kappa

University of Florida

1987

Awards and Fellowships

Jan 1987Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Doctoral Fellowship

Dissertation Title: 'There is Death in the Pot': Women, Consumption, and Free Produce in the Transatlantic World, 1791-1848

Master's

Present

Mona L. Reeder, Fine Arts

Dec 2015

Eric Chastain

Dec 2015

Michael Dasha (non-thesis, Committee Chair)

Nov 2015

Nathan Johnson

May 2015

Christine Heimerman, Fine Arts

May 2015

Joseph Lincecum (nonthesis, committee chair)

Dec 2014

Daniel Simpson (non-thesis, Committee Chair)

May 2014

Sydney Webb, Fine Arts

May 2014

Zach Reimer

May 2013

Hannah Hudson, Fine Arts

Dec 2012

Sammy Wilson (Thesis Supervisor)

May 2012

Keycha Schlotterbeck

May 2011

Caroline Craig (non-thesis, Committee Chair)

May 2011

Don Gross

May 2011

Kallie Kosc

May 2011

Melody Woods

May 2011

Walter Adams

Collaborators

Robert Markley, Trowbridge Professor of English, University of Illinois; Michael Simeone, Assistant Professor and Director, Nexus Lab for Transdisciplinary Informatics, Arizona State University

Duration : Oct 2013 to Present

“Mapping the Great Lakes: Computational Visual Analysis, Historical Cartography, and Climate History, 1650-1850.” I am working as part of an interdisciplinary collaboration involving computer scientists and humanists that is digitizing over 400 maps and machine reading (at the supercomputing center at the University of Illinois) their variations in cartographic depictions of coastlines, islands, and water passages for evidence of short-term meteorological and long-term climatological change. My contribution includes research into the climatological and hydrological history of the Great Lakes based on published physical and biological data and archival records in Canadian and U. S. archives. The University of Pennsylvania Press has expressed interest in publication as part of a digital humanities series.

Alaimo and Morris are the institutional collaborators for UTA in The Seed Box: Mistra-Formas Environmental Humanities Collaboratory, a four-year research hub hosted by Linköping University in Sweden. UTA is one of 7 international partner institutions. The goals of the collaboration are: To advance transdisciplinary environmental humanities (EH) scholarship, and to underwrite a systematic transnationalization and interdisciplining of Swedish EH research; To advance the field of EH in both established and emerging directions, focusing on top priority issues, and with an overarching commitment to methodological and conceptual innovation; To create a high-quality international research environment which is intellectually attractive, stimulating and challenging as well as mutually supportive for both senior and junior scholars. To further an applied (yet philosophically advanced) citizen dimension within environmental humanities.

Courses

HIST 3327-001THE NEW SOUTH, 1863-PRESENT

This course covers the South’s tortured but fascinating journey from plantations and slavery to skyscrapers, high-tech industry, and racial integration. This is a course in U.S. regional history, and so we will discuss how the South remained a distinct region even after the end of slavery, what that meant for the South and the nation, and finally the extent to which the South today remains distinct in meaningful ways. Major topics will include: the promise and disappointment of emancipation, the Lost Cause, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow segregation, the continued expansion and painful decline of cotton agriculture, single party politics and populist demagogues, the South in film, religion, literature, music, civil rights, and the rise of the Sunbelt South.

Office Hours

This course covers the South’s tortured but fascinating journey from plantations and slavery to skyscrapers, high-tech industry, and racial integration. This is a course in U.S. regional history, and so we will discuss how the South remained a distinct region even after the end of slavery, what that meant for the South and the nation, and finally the extent to which the South today remains distinct in meaningful ways. Major topics will include: the promise and disappointment of emancipation, the Lost Cause, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow segregation, the continued expansion and painful decline of cotton agriculture, single party politics and populist demagogues, the South in film, religion, literature, music, civil rights, and the rise of the Sunbelt South.

View Contact Info & Office Hours

Office Hours

HIST 4388-002Natural Disasters in History / Intro to Environmental and Sustainability Studies

This course will introduce students to basic concepts of sustainability by having them examine four disasters that occurred about 100 years ago: the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, the Paris Flood of 1910, and the world-wide Influenza Epidemic of 1918. Students will be asked to consider the causes, responses, and consequences of these catastrophes (environmental, social, political, economic, and scientific understanding), and to compare them to present-day disasters by seeking to understand past and present in terms of policy, politics, and science of sustainability. Along the way, the class will interrogate the meaning of the word “sustainable,” (and related concepts) by considering how it has been used, by whom, with what reasons, to sustain what, with what effect.

Office Hours

GEOG 4350-002Natural Disasters in History / Intro to Environmental and Sustainability Studies

This course will introduce students to basic concepts of sustainability by having them examine four disasters that occurred about 100 years ago: the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, the Paris Flood of 1910, and the world-wide Influenza Epidemic of 1918. Students will be asked to consider the causes, responses, and consequences of these catastrophes (environmental, social, political, economic, and scientific understanding), and to compare them to present-day disasters by seeking to understand past and present in terms of policy, politics, and science of sustainability. Along the way, the class will interrogate the meaning of the word “sustainable,” (and related concepts) by considering how it has been used, by whom, with what reasons, to sustain what, with what effect.

View Contact Info & Office Hours

Office Hours

ESST 2300-001Natural Disasters in History / Intro to Environmental and Sustainability Studies

This course will introduce students to basic concepts of sustainability by having them examine four disasters that occurred about 100 years ago: the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, the Paris Flood of 1910, and the world-wide Influenza Epidemic of 1918. Students will be asked to consider the causes, responses, and consequences of these catastrophes (environmental, social, political, economic, and scientific understanding), and to compare them to present-day disasters by seeking to understand past and present in terms of policy, politics, and science of sustainability. Along the way, the class will interrogate the meaning of the word “sustainable,” (and related concepts) by considering how it has been used, by whom, with what reasons, to sustain what, with what effect.

Office Hours

This course has four primary goals: First, to understand the historical origins of what remains one of the most enduring regional cultures of the United States; second, to explore from within the context of the South as a historical place some of the major events and historical processes that shaped the history of the U.S., for example, the American Revolution, westward expansion, the spread of capitalism, secession and civil war; third, to consider southern history from the perspective of free and enslaved southerners. Finally, this course will help students to understand and participate knowledgably in present-day discussions about the legacy of the Old South and how it ought to be remembered and memorialized.

This course will emphasize the relationship between the idea and experience of living, creating economies, fashioning politics, working, fighting, cooperating, in what became the United States, as Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans interacted in the North American environment. By the end of the course students will be able to connect these sub-themes to explain the emergence of the United States as a capitalist democracy by the middle of the 19th century. In addition, this course is part of the UTA Core, and as such, it has additional objectives.

Office Hours

This course begins with first encounters between Europeans and Native Americans and quickly moves to the subject of the fur trade, which though centered in the east, transformed the human and physical geography of the entire continent. The history of the fur trade created the West that Lewis and Clark “discovered.” We will also investigate the earlier explorers who inspired Lewis and Clark, and their mentor, Thomas Jefferson. In particular, we will examine Daniel Boone in life, fiction, memory, television, and film. We will end with Lewis and Clark, a new breed of “scientific” explorers who largely failed to capture the attention of their contemporaries, but who have since come to symbolize the westward expansion of the U.S.

Office Hours

This course examines the solidification and expansion of the young republic from the era of Revolution and the coming of the Civil War. We will examine the development of the two-party system, of capitalism and the market economy, of new forms of religious expression, and the parallel expansion westward of liberty and slavery.

Office Hours

This course will emphasize the relationship between the idea and experience of living, creating economies, fashioning politics, working, fighting, cooperating, in what became the United States, as Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans interacted in the North American environment. By the end of the course students will be able to connect these sub-themes to explain the emergence of the United States as a capitalist democracy by the middle of the 19th century. It is an additional objective of the course to develop student communication and analytical skills that will prove invaluable to them when they leave UTA.

This course will examine four disasters that occurred about 100 years ago: the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, the Paris Flood of 1910, and the world-wide Influenza Epidemic of 1918. Students will be asked to consider the causes, responses, and consequences of these catastrophes (environmental, social, political, economic, and scientific understanding), and to compare them to present-day disasters by seeking to understand past and present in terms of policy, politics, and science of sustainability. Along the way, the class will interrogate the meaning of the word “sustainable,” (and related concepts) by considering how it has been used, by whom, with what reasons, to sustain what, with what effect.

This course will examine four disasters that occurred about 100 years ago: the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, the Paris Flood of 1910, and the world-wide Influenza Epidemic of 1918. Students will be asked to consider the causes, responses, and consequences of these catastrophes (environmental, social, political, economic, and scientific understanding), and to compare them to present-day disasters by seeking to understand past and present in terms of policy, politics, and science of sustainability. Along the way, the class will interrogate the meaning of the word “sustainable,” (and related concepts) by considering how it has been used, by whom, with what reasons, to sustain what, with what effect.

This course will introduce students to basic concepts of sustainability by having them examine four disasters that occurred about 100 years ago: the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, the Paris Flood of 1910, and the world-wide Influenza Epidemic of 1918. Students will be asked to consider the causes, responses, and consequences of these catastrophes (environmental, social, political, economic, and scientific understanding), and to compare them to present-day disasters by seeking to understand past and present in terms of policy, politics, and science of sustainability. Along the way, the class will interrogate the meaning of the word “sustainable,” (and related concepts) by considering how it has been used, by whom, with what reasons, to sustain what, with what effect.

This course will introduce students to basic concepts necessary to understand and engage present-day debates over policy, politics, and science of sustainability and the relationship between people and the natural environment. This will be accomplished primarily be exploring the history of sustainability and the human-environmental relationship in the United States. The history of the United States has been shaped by a close relationship between people and the North American environment, relationships that have not always been sustainable. The land has altered human behavior and touched human consciousness as surely as people have transformed the land in ways both constructive and destructive. From the colonial period when nature mediated relations between Europeans and Native Americans to cattle ranching in the West to modern environmental engineering to conservation and environmentalist politics, this class will explore the largely unconsidered but crucial role non-human nature has played in the human history of America (and vice versa).

This course will introduce students to basic concepts necessary to understand and engage present-day debates over policy, politics, and science of sustainability and the relationship between people and the natural environment. This will be accomplished primarily be exploring the history of sustainability and the human-environmental relationship in the United States. The history of the United States has been shaped by a close relationship between people and the North American environment, relationships that have not always been sustainable. The land has altered human behavior and touched human consciousness as surely as people have transformed the land in ways both constructive and destructive. From the colonial period when nature mediated relations between Europeans and Native Americans to cattle ranching in the West to modern environmental engineering to conservation and environmentalist politics, this class will explore the largely unconsidered but crucial role non-human nature has played in the human history of America (and vice versa).

This course will introduce students to basic concepts necessary to understand and engage present-day debates over policy, politics, and science of sustainability and the relationship between people and the natural environment. This will be accomplished primarily be exploring the history of sustainability and the human-environmental relationship in the United States. The history of the United States has been shaped by a close relationship between people and the North American environment, relationships that have not always been sustainable. The land has altered human behavior and touched human consciousness as surely as people have transformed the land in ways both constructive and destructive. From the colonial period when nature mediated relations between Europeans and Native Americans to cattle ranching in the West to modern environmental engineering to conservation and environmentalist politics, this class will explore the largely unconsidered but crucial role non-human nature has played in the human history of America (and vice versa).

This course introduces students to ways in which historians 1) decide what questions are worth investigating 2) conduct research into those questions 3) write about what they have found and 4) critique each other’s research and writing. Students will write and present a research paper in the style of professional historians.

The goal of this course is for each student to produce research a paper of publishable quality based on primary sources, on a topic of the student’s choice within the general history of slavery in the United States and/or the Transatlantic World. Students will be required to select a topic of historiographical relevance, to formulate a thesis or argument based on research into secondary and primary source materials, and to present the full argument in a 25-30 page essay that is free of spelling and grammatical errors, is clear and logical, and is in accord with the Chicago Manual of Style. The final product, the essay, will be the primary means for assessing the extent to which students have met the goals of this class.

Office Hours

This course is a basic introduction to the discipline of history and is required for all History M.A. and Ph.D. students. No prior knowledge of historiographical issues is expected or required, and the course therefore should be accessible to students regardless of their particular field of interest or concentration.

This course will emphasize the relationship between the idea and experience of living, creating economies, fashioning politics, working, fighting, cooperating, in what became the United States, as Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans interacted in the North American environment. By the end of the course students will be able to connect these sub-themes to explain the emergence of the United States as a capitalist democracy by the middle of the 19th century. It is an additional objective of the course to develop student communication and analytical skills that will prove invaluable to them when they leave UTA.

This course will introduce students to basic concepts necessary to understand and engage present-day debates over policy, politics, and science of sustainability and the relationship between people and the natural environment. This will be accomplished primarily be exploring the history of sustainability and the human-environmental relationship in the United States. The history of the United States has been shaped by a close relationship between people and the North American environment, relationships that have not always been sustainable. The land has altered human behavior and touched human consciousness as surely as people have transformed the land in ways both constructive and destructive. From the colonial period when nature mediated relations between Europeans and Native Americans to cattle ranching in the West to modern environmental engineering to conservation and environmentalist politics, this class will explore the largely unconsidered but crucial role non-human nature has played in the human history of America (and vice versa).

This course will introduce students to basic concepts necessary to understand and engage present-day debates over policy, politics, and science of sustainability and the relationship between people and the natural environment. This will be accomplished primarily be exploring the history of sustainability and the human-environmental relationship in the United States. The history of the United States has been shaped by a close relationship between people and the North American environment, relationships that have not always been sustainable. The land has altered human behavior and touched human consciousness as surely as people have transformed the land in ways both constructive and destructive. From the colonial period when nature mediated relations between Europeans and Native Americans to cattle ranching in the West to modern environmental engineering to conservation and environmentalist politics, this class will explore the largely unconsidered but crucial role non-human nature has played in the human history of America (and vice versa).

This course will introduce students to basic concepts necessary to understand and engage present-day debates over policy, politics, and science of sustainability and the relationship between people and the natural environment. This will be accomplished primarily be exploring the history of sustainability and the human-environmental relationship in the United States. The history of the United States has been shaped by a close relationship between people and the North American environment, relationships that have not always been sustainable. The land has altered human behavior and touched human consciousness as surely as people have transformed the land in ways both constructive and destructive. From the colonial period when nature mediated relations between Europeans and Native Americans to cattle ranching in the West to modern environmental engineering to conservation and environmentalist politics, this class will explore the largely unconsidered but crucial role non-human nature has played in the human history of America (and vice versa).

This course will emphasize the relationship between the idea and experience of living, creating economies, fashioning politics, working, fighting, cooperating, in what became the United States, as Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans interacted in the North American environment. By the end of the course students will be able to connect these sub-themes to explain the emergence of the United States as a capitalist democracy by the middle of the 19th century. It is an additional objective of the course to develop student communication and analytical skills that will prove invaluable to them when they leave UTA.

This course will trace the development of the United States from a colonial economy in the first British Empire to a growing industrial economy in its own right. Specific topics will include the role of the colonies in the British mercantile system, the economic origins of slavery and plantation agriculture, the economic causes and consequences of the Revolution, how to farm eighteenth-century style, early urbanization and industrialization, the cotton south, the economy of the slaves, the role of government and law in economic development, the economic causes of the Civil War. By the end of the course students will be able to connect these various topics to offer a general description of the emergence of the United States as an industrial capitalist market economy based on free wage labor. It is an additional objective of the course to develop student communication and analytical skills that will prove invaluable to them when they leave UTA.

This course will trace the development of capitalism, from its origins in England, its growth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the Atlantic commodities and slave trade, and its emergence in the nineteenth century as a global system. We will also consider the scholarly debates over the definition and historical manifestations of capitalism, of its relationship to slavery and the slave trade, of its role in the American Revolution, and of its place in the emergence of the empires of the nineteenth century, specifically, in particular, those of Great Britain in India and the U.S. across the North American continent.

This course introduces students to ways in which historians 1) decide what questions are worth investigating 2) conduct research into those questions 3) write about what they have found and 4) critique each other’s research and writing. Students will write and present a research paper in the style of professional historians.

Office Hours

This course covers the South’s tortured but fascinating journey from plantations and slavery to skyscrapers, high-tech industry, and racial integration. This is a course in U.S. regional history, and so we will discuss how the South remained a distinct region even after the end of slavery, what that meant for the South and the nation, and finally the extent to which the South today remains distinct in meaningful ways. Major topics will include: the promise and disappointment of emancipation, the Lost Cause, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow segregation, the continued expansion and painful decline of cotton agriculture, single party politics and populist demagogues, the South in film, religion, literature, music, civil rights, and the rise of the Sunbelt South.

Office Hours

HIST 1312 surveys broadly the history of the United States from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the end of the twentieth century. This section specifically considers United States history in terms of the rise of the United States as an industrial capitalist superpower, a process that began during the Civil War and that culminated with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By the end of the course students will be able to connect this overall theme to related sub-themes of race relations, women’s rights, the westward and global expansions of the United States as a military and economic power, the rise and fall of big business, big labor, and big government, and the expressions of these historical moments in American popular culture, including film and music. It is an additional objective of the course to develop student communication and analytical skills that will prove invaluable to them when they leave UTA.

This course is a basic introduction to the discipline of history and is required for all History M.A. and Ph.D. students. No prior knowledge of historiographical issues is expected or required, and the course therefore should be accessible to students regardless of their particular field of interest or concentration.

Office Hours

This course has three primary goals: First, to understand the historical and environmental origins of what remains one of the most enduring regional cultures of the United States; second, to explore from within the context of the South as a historical and environmental place some of the major events and historical processes that shaped the history of the U.S., for example, the American Revolution, westward expansion, the spread of capitalism, secession and civil war; third, to consider southern history from the perspective of free and enslaved southerners.

Office Hours

HIST 4388-007UNSUSTAINABLE! DESTRUCTION, EXTINCTION, AND CATASTOPHIC FAILURE IN HISTORY

This course will introduce students to basic concepts necessary to understand and engage present-day debates over policy, politics, and science of sustainability. This will be accomplished primarily by exploring past examples of communities and societies that have collapsed because their relationship with the natural environment was unsustainable, and by connecting these past examples to present-day problems and issues of sustainability. Along the way, the class will interrogate the meaning of the word “sustainable,” by considering how it has been used, by whom, with what reasons, to sustain what, with what effect.

This course will introduce students to basic concepts necessary to understand and engage present-day debates over policy, politics, and science of sustainability. This will be accomplished primarily by exploring past examples of communities and societies that have collapsed because their relationship with the natural environment was unsustainable, and by connecting these past examples to present-day problems and issues of sustainability. Along the way, the class will interrogate the meaning of the word “sustainable,” by considering how it has been used, by whom, with what reasons, to sustain what, with what effect.

This course will emphasize the relationship between the idea and experience of living, creating economies, fashioning politics, working, fighting, cooperating, in what became the United States, as Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans interacted in the North American environment. By the end of the course students will be able to connect these sub-themes to explain the emergence of the United States as a capitalist democracy by the middle of the 19th century.

Office Hours

This course introduces students to ways in which historians 1) decide what questions are worth investigating 2) conduct research into those questions 3) write about what they have found and 4) critique each other’s research and writing. Students will write and present a research paper in the style of professional historians.

Office Hours

This colloquium will survey the major issues, themes, books, and articles on the history of trans-Atlantic slavery. We will begin by examining the books that first established the field in general, and then quickly move to more recent studies and more specific subtopics, for example: West Africa and the slave trade; African cultures in America; work patterns and the demands of specific crops; colonial slavery versus slavery post independence; slave family and community life; gender and slavery; resistance, insurrection, and maroonage. All topics will be considered within a comparative perspective.

Office Hours

This course introduces students to ways in which historians 1) decide what questions are worth investigating 2) conduct research into those questions 3) write about what they have found and 4) critique each other’s research and writing. By the end of the semester students will be expected to: explain the concept of historiography and to describe the historiography of a topic of their choice; identify and use professional historical journals; distinguish primary from secondary sources; formulate historiographically valid as well as researchable questions; identify, locate, assess, and use primary sources to answer a question; write a research paper in the style of professional historians.

This course will introduce students to basic concepts necessary to understand and engage present-day debates over policy, politics, and science of sustainability and the relationship between people and the natural environment. This will be accomplished primarily be exploring the history of sustainability and the human-environmental relationship in the United States. The history of the United States has been shaped by a close relationship between people and the North American environment, relationships that have not always been sustainable. The land has altered human behavior and touched human consciousness as surely as people have transformed the land in ways both constructive and destructive. From the colonial period when nature mediated relations between Europeans and Native Americans to cattle ranching in the West to modern environmental engineering to conservation and environmentalist politics, this class will explore the largely unconsidered but crucial role non-human nature has played in the human history of America (and vice versa).

This course will introduce students to basic concepts necessary to understand and engage present-day debates over policy, politics, and science of sustainability and the relationship between people and the natural environment. This will be accomplished primarily be exploring the history of sustainability and the human-environmental relationship in the United States. The history of the United States has been shaped by a close relationship between people and the North American environment, relationships that have not always been sustainable. The land has altered human behavior and touched human consciousness as surely as people have transformed the land in ways both constructive and destructive. From the colonial period when nature mediated relations between Europeans and Native Americans to cattle ranching in the West to modern environmental engineering to conservation and environmentalist politics, this class will explore the largely unconsidered but crucial role non-human nature has played in the human history of America (and vice versa).

This course will introduce students to basic concepts necessary to understand and engage present-day debates over policy, politics, and science of sustainability and the relationship between people and the natural environment. This will be accomplished primarily be exploring the history of sustainability and the human-environmental relationship in the United States. The history of the United States has been shaped by a close relationship between people and the North American environment, relationships that have not always been sustainable. The land has altered human behavior and touched human consciousness as surely as people have transformed the land in ways both constructive and destructive. From the colonial period when nature mediated relations between Europeans and Native Americans to cattle ranching in the West to modern environmental engineering to conservation and environmentalist politics, this class will explore the largely unconsidered but crucial role non-human nature has played in the human history of America (and vice versa).

This course is a basic introduction to the discipline of history and is required for all History M.A. and Ph.D. students. No prior knowledge of historiographical issues is expected or required, and the course therefore should be accessible to students regardless of their particular field of interest or concentration.

History is not just a craft; it is a way of thinking. It is an intellectual endeavor. This class is designed to make students think, not about the past, but about how historians think about the past. This we will do by jumping into some of the ongoing debates among historians over what it is they do and how they ought to do whatever it is they do. We will consider broad philosophical problems, survey some of the social theories underlying (explicitly and implicitly) much of modern historical thought, and review recent trends in the discipline. We will discuss current literary theories that question the whole enterprise of historical research and writing as it has been practiced over the last century. As historians, you will not want to take any of this lying down, so to speak, but will want to engage these important matters of life and death (for the discipline of history) intelligently, well informed, and enthusiastically.

HIST 1312 surveys broadly the history of the United States from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the end of the twentieth century. This section specifically considers United States history in terms of the rise of the United States as an industrial capitalist superpower, a process that began during the Civil War and that culminated with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By the end of the course students will be able to connect this overall theme to related sub-themes of race relations, women’s rights, the westward and global expansions of the United States as a military and economic power, the rise and fall of big business, big labor, and big government, and the expressions of these historical moments in American popular culture, including film and music. It is an additional objective of the course to develop student communication and analytical skills that will prove invaluable to them when they leave UTA.

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Contact

This course explores some of the roles rivers have played in the history of the United States, including providing Europeans with access to the interior of North America, powering the initial phase of industrialization, serving as the nation’s first interstate highway system, and later, as the first interstate sewer system, irrigating western farms and golf courses, and offering playgrounds for sporting people of all sorts. America’s rivers have also played a central role within the natural environment that is home, not only to the nation’s people, but to all its non-human residents. Throughout much of U.S. history, the determination to make rivers serve the purposes of the nation and its peoples, to understand them scientifically, and to measure their value in those terms, has resulted in their being disconnected from the rest of the environment, often in ways that have worked against U.S. interests.

View Contact Info & Office Hours

Contact Info

Contact

This course explores some of the roles rivers have played in the history of the United States, including providing Europeans with access to the interior of North America, powering the initial phase of industrialization, serving as the nation’s first interstate highway system, and later, as the first interstate sewer system, irrigating western farms and golf courses, and offering playgrounds for sporting people of all sorts. America’s rivers have also played a central role within the natural environment that is home, not only to the nation’s people, but to all its non-human residents. Throughout much of U.S. history, the determination to make rivers serve the purposes of the nation and its peoples, to understand them scientifically, and to measure their value in those terms, has resulted in their being disconnected from the rest of the environment, often in ways that have worked against U.S. interests.

Through a survey of key texts on topics ranging from the pre-colonial era to the present, this course will explore the field of environmental history as it is practiced in and applied to the United States. Along the way the class will consider theoretical and conceptual matters debated by historians: What is nature? What is wilderness? What is conservation? As well, the class will consider more practical concerns: What distinguishes environmental history from historical geography, historical ecology, or critical and cultural studies of nature writing? Should environmental historians be trained in ecology and biology? Finally, we will consider what environmental history has to offer “traditional” history: Do we need an environmental history of the Civil War? What does environmental history mean for the traditional temporal and national boundaries of historical research? Does environmental history offer a new perspective on the past, or does it speak more to present-day concerns?

TEXTS:

Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships in the Fur Trade

Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History 175-1920

William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

Contact

This course will emphasize the relationship between the idea and experience of living, creating economies, fashioning politics, working, fighting, cooperating, in what became the United States, as Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans interacted in the North American environment. By the end of the course students will be able to connect these sub-themes to explain the emergence of the United States as a capitalist democracy by the middle of the 19th century. It is an additional objective of the course to develop student communication and analytical skills that will prove invaluable to them when they leave UTA.

View Contact Info & Office Hours

This course begins with first encounters between Europeans and Native Americans and quickly moves to the subject of the fur trade, which though centered in the east, transformed the human and physical geography of the entire continent. The history of the fur trade created the West that Lewis and Clark "discovered."We will also investigate the earlier explorers who inspired Lewis and Clark, and their mentor, Thomas Jefferson. In particular, we will examine Daniel Boone in life, fiction, memory, television, and film. We will end with Lewis and Clark, a new breed of "scientific" explorers who largely failed to capture the attention of their contemporaries, but who have since come to symbolize the westward expansion of the U.S.

Office Hours

This course covers the South's tortured but fascinating journey from plantations and slavery to skyscrapers, high-tech industry, and racial integration. This is a course in U.S. regional history, and so we will discuss how the South remained a distinct region even after the end of slavery, what that meant for the South and the nation, and finally the extent to which the South today remains distinct in meaningful ways. In addition to race and region, the historical relationship between southerners and their, what some describe as unique, natural environment will be an important theme throughout this course.

This course will trace the development of the United States from a colonial economy in the first British Empire to a growing industrial economy in its own right. Specific topics will include the role of the colonies in the British mercantile system, the economic origins of slavery and plantation agriculture, the economic causes and consequences of the Revolution, how to farm eighteenth-century style, early urbanization and industrialization, the cotton south, the economy of the slaves, the role of government and law in economic development, the economic causes of the Civil War. By the end of the course students will be able to connect these various topics to offer a general description of the emergence of the United States as an industrial capitalist market economy based on free wage labor.

Service to the Profession

Sept 2014 to
Dec 2014Manuscript review for the Journal of Southern History

Peer review of a manuscript

Appointed

June 2015 to
PresentEditorial Board

The Southern Quarterly: A Journal of Arts & Letters in the South

Jan 2010 to
Dec 2015Editorial Board

Journal of the Civil War Era

Service to the University

Volunteered

Mar 2012 to
Mar 2016Judge, Annual Celebration of Excellence by Students (ACES)

Judged graduate and undergraduate research presentations for the Institute on Sustainability and Global Impact ACES Research Awards.

Apr 2007 to
PresentChair, Board of Advisors, Institute for Sustainability and Global Impact (formerly the Curriculum, Research, and Community Engagement Working Group for the University Sustainability Committee)

Working to develop environmental and sustainability curriculum; organizing and judging faculty fellowships, travel grants, and speaker grants; helping to manage the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Minor; helping to advance the mission of the UTA Institute for Sustainability and Global Impact.

Appointed

July 2013 to
May 2015History Department Tenure and Promotion Committee

Review candidates for tenure and promotion, as well as annual reviews of untenured faculty.

"Mississippi 1500-1800," a permanent exhibit, Old Capitol Museum, Jackson Mississippi. Author of "Jacques Rapalje's Notebook," a flip book text attached to a story bar in an exhibit entitled "Colonial Refugees."

Landscape Architecture Magazine interviewed for an article on my research into the concept of “disturbance” as used by engineers, ecologists, and others working on river control and floodplain restoration projects, April 15, 2014.